The company calls the data "Precision Marketing Insights," and if it sounds like there are privacy concerns here, you're right.

Marketers buy this customer info and can readily link it to the customers' gender and age, and can even include finer details identifying someone as a "pet owner" or "sports enthusiast."

Verizon maintains that the practice is legal, since none of this data can be paired to a specific person's identity. It also allows customers to opt out at any time.

Verizon marketing boss Bill Diggins' words on the subject earlier this year are less than reassuring, however: "We're able to view just everything that they do. And that's really where data is going today. Data is the new oil."